Aste the number of shipping there are, from Bath, Maine, to Newport News, Virginia, only six, employing from five to eight thousand men when running at full time. If the United States carried ninety per cent. of her commerce in her own ships, instead of only nine per cent., it would mean the employment of 500,000 men in the shipbuilding yards on the Atlantic alone, and a weekly wage list of from one to three million dollars.
The record shows that since the civil war the American Government has appeared strangely indifferent to the building of a merchant Jury 13, 1912, Within the boundaries of quantities of steel, iron, coal, naval supplies, safe harbours, and abundant labour, and yet only nine per cent., of its ocean trade ix carried under its own flag.
The Congressional record proves that for the first twenty years after the civil war, the Republican party, then in complete control of the Government, directed its main legislation to subordinate nine Southern States to the rule of negroes, but having ignominiously failed, the remainder of the forty: two years of its ascendency hax been consumed in subsidizing corporations by high tariff laws. It has eeen the American flag dis appear from the seas, and the shipping companies of other nations enriched by freight collected from ing American products under foreign flags,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.